Not Quite Scheherazade
by Kantayra
Summary: There is only one power in the universe capable of bringing even the most powerful ninja to their knees. Watch, as Naruto defeats Sasuke using the horrifying might that is *filler*! Naruto/Sasuke, silly fic.


Disclaimer: If I owned them, filler arcs would actually serve a _purpose_.

Summary: There is only one power in the universe capable of bringing even the most powerful ninja to their knees. Watch, as Naruto defeats Sasuke using the horrifying might that is _filler_! Naruto/Sasuke, silly fic.

Note: Just because I had to find _some_ way to justify all those horrible filler arcs. And, yes, everything Naruto mentions actually _happened_. How did we ever survive? :P

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Not Quite Scheherazade  
by Kantayra

Naruto respected and admired all his teachers, but sometimes he thought they didn't know anything. He knew he wasn't as smart as Kakashi, as cool as Asuma, as strong as Tsunade, or as powerful as Jiraiya. Still, a lot of the time, he thought his teachers completely missed the point. All of them prepared him for his final showdown with Sasuke in their own ways, and all of them seemed to think that unblockable death-strikes were the way to go.

It all seemed very silly to Naruto.

"Hey, bastard!" Naruto called out across the battlefield, holding his hands out in front of himself to show that he wasn't about to attack. "Time out for a minute, okay?"

Sasuke's right eye twitched in disbelief. "Time out? What is this, the Academy?"

"No, no," Naruto laughed sheepishly, scratching the back of his head. "There's just something I need to tell you before we fight. I promise I won't try to attack you in any way."

Sasuke's hand hesitated on the hilt of his sword. He looked torn. "What's this about?" he demanded.

"Come on, jerk, just agree to the time out." Naruto struck his best good guy pose. "I swear by my Way of the Ninja that I'll do you no harm."

Sasuke's Sharingan narrowed in pointedly on where Naruto had stuck his thumb up in the air. "Like you could anyway," he muttered. Then, he sighed and let go of his sword. "Whatever, sure."

Naruto grinned from ear to ear and sat down against a nearby tree. "Come over here. I'm not shouting this halfway across the forest."

"Idiot," Sasuke grumbled and stalked over to him. He finally came to stand before Naruto, one hand on his hip and an expression on his face like he still couldn't believe anyone had been incompetent enough to make Naruto a ninja in the first place.

"Sit down, sit down." Naruto patted the ground beside him. "This might take a little while."

"Might take a little while…?" Sasuke repeated under his breath with a roll of his eyes. "You're an embarrassment to shinobi everywhere, dead last."

Naruto glared at him. "Whatever, bastard. This is important. Now, _sit down_."

Naruto wasn't sure how it was possible to sit down while making it look like the greatest imposition in the whole universe, but Sasuke managed quite nicely. He also sat a few feet further away from Naruto than Naruto had indicated.

"Now, _talk_," Sasuke ordered once he was seated in perfect lotus position. "I don't have all day."

Naruto studied him for a moment before frowning. "Hey, asshole, have you been sleeping all right? Because you've got these dark circles under your eyes and—"

"It's none of your business," Sasuke snapped.

"Right, right," Naruto laughed. "Forget I asked. So…"

"Yeah," Sasuke agreed. "'So.' Get to the point already."

Naruto shrugged it off. "So I've been getting advice from a lot of people on how to beat you lately…"

"If this is another of your threats, I've heard enough boasting from you to last me a lifetime." Sasuke moved to get up.

"Even _Itachi_ came to talk to me about you."

Sasuke promptly sat right back down. "What did he say?" he demanded icily.

"That even he knows I'm the better ninja, and I can kick your ass any day." Naruto stuck his tongue out at Sasuke.

Sasuke lunged, looking very un-ninja-like at that moment, his fist raised. Naruto managed to catch it, but they still rolled over in the dirt twice before their altercation came to a quick halt. Sasuke brushed the dust off his clothes and ran a hand through his bangs like nothing had happened.

Naruto scowled at him. "Hey, no fair, bastard! I _promised_ I wouldn't fight you. Attacking me when I'm defenseless is cheating."

"When are you ever _not_ defenseless?" Sasuke shot back, that smug smirk on his face that Naruto had been itching to wipe off since they were in the Academy.

"Whatever, jerk. I'm being serious. Itachi _did_ come see me." Naruto crossed his arms over his chest and sulked.

"Fine, fine, I believe you. Now, what did my brother want with you?"

"Ah…yeah." Naruto let out a nervous laugh. "Well, you see, you're kind of behind, so I've got to explain a whole bunch of stuff to you before any of the rest of it will make sense," Naruto chattered on aimlessly.

"Are you stalling?" Sasuke accused.

"No, no!" Naruto assured him. "This is all really important, I promise."

"Hn." Sasuke rolled his eyes, sat back, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Get on with it, then."

"Right," Naruto agreed. "So it all started after I woke up in the hospital after our fight in the Valley of the End. The perverted hermit showed up, and he was all, 'blah-blah, forget about Sasuke' and I was all, 'but I made a promise to Sakura-chan!' And he said that Akatsuki was coming to get me, so I had to go off to train with him for three years so that Itachi wouldn't kill me in, like, two seconds."

Sasuke's eyes narrowed at Naruto's rambling.

"Except me and Sakura-chan are all, 'We need to go to Sound and chase Sasuke down _now_!' And the pervert and Granny Tsunade are, like, 'Sure, whatever' because they know they can't stop us. So we go to Sound, and there's this chick with really weird red hair, and she's looking for her cousin who also ran off to join Orochimaru. Like a jerk." Naruto glared at Sasuke.

"Is there a _point_ to this?" Sasuke snapped.

"Absolutely! It's all important," Naruto informed him with a cheerful smile.

Sasuke's eyes narrowed at that smile. He couldn't tell if Naruto was lying, though. Damn, he'd been away for too long…

"So we go to this hide-out, and we fight Orochimaru and Kabuto, but it's not _really_ Orochimaru and Kabuto. And the not-really-Kabuto says you're dead, but I'm all, 'Ha ha, Sasuke is too much of a bastard to die that easily.' And then he did this thing where our hearts were connected, but not in a perverted way. So it turned out the not-really-Orochimaru was actually the chick with the red hair's long-lost cousin, except now he was all messed up due to Orochimaru's experiments. And then the whole place blew up, but we got out. Except for the chick's cousin. It was sad."

Sasuke felt himself slowly sink into the state of desperate boredom that could only be provoked by Naruto's exceptionally long and wandering stories. He half tuned out, picking up phrases here and there in the hope that sooner or later Naruto would come to his point.

"…the pervert ran out on me _again_…Mizuki staged a prison riot and turned into a tiger…went with Shino to find this really rare bug to track you…stupid bug kept landing on my ass for _months_…this Raiga jerk with electric swords, except not as cool as yours, not that you're cool anyway, bastard…"

Sasuke couldn't help it. Naruto had been right about his assessment earlier: Sasuke _was_ tired. And Naruto had the amazing ability to go on forever. At this rate, they'd probably get around to actually fighting some time next month. So, in a massive failure of self-discipline, Sasuke yawned a rather cosmic yawn.

Naruto's jabbering continued on unabated, but his eyes flickered over to Sasuke for just a second when he yawned. "And then we all ate the Curry of Life a lot. So then Granny Tsunade tricked me into mentoring Konohamaru's team at the Academy for a day, and we got lost in the woods and nearly died on a mountain, before I saved everyone. And then I went to chase this bounty hunter with Kiba and Hinata-chan, but it turned out he was an okay guy, so we didn't bring him in, and Granny Tsunade yelled at us a lot. And then I trained with Gai and Lee for a while, before there was this ghost haunting the Bird Country. And Granny Tsunade put Neji in charge, so _he_ yelled at me a lot."

Sasuke yawned again and rested his cheek on his hand. He'd learned some patience over the years, but this was a bit much even for him. "Hurry up already, dead last," he said wearily.

"I'm getting there!" Naruto insisted. "It turns out it wasn't a ghost."

"Duh," Sasuke rolled his eyes.

"Except maybe there was this other ghost, I'm not sure. But whatever, bastard, I wasn't scared for a minute! So then we had to make the best ramen _ever_ to help that old man Teuchi get his daughter Ayame back, and it was totally delicious. Then we went to the Sea Country with Anko because there was this sea monster there attacking ships, but it turned out it was just this crazy guy in one of Orochimaru's old labs. And, hey, we only just missed you there, huh, bastard?"

"Hn," Sasuke grunted in agreement. His eyelids were getting heavier by the minute.

"But the Kaima girl turned out to be cool in the end," Naruto continued on, as perky as ever. "Then, when we got back home, there was this kid who used money no jutsu for everything, except then his bodyguards got bribed, and I had to save him. Then Granny Tsunade told me, Hinata-chan, and Kiba that we sucked, and she'd boot us all back down to the Academy if we didn't find this stupid treasure. But it was all just a test, because we all know that I'm too great a shinobi for that, and that's why I passed the test with flying colors! Then I almost got arrested for assaulting a postman because I was trying to tell him he'd gotten the old pervert's packages mixed up. Then I went to the Star Country, and there were these people who used this radioactive meteor to become flying peacocks or something."

A sound much like a snore escaped Sasuke's mouth, and he jerked himself awake with a start.

"So they stopped using the radioactive flying peacock meteor, and no one got sick again, and everyone was happy. Then Akamaru got sick, and Hana barely saved him in time. Then an Onbaa latched onto my back because it thought I was its mother, and everyone laughed at me, but then Onbaa latched onto _their_ backs too, and I laughed at them. Then Shino had to not laugh. Then we had to protect the princess of the Vegetable Country and put her back on the throne. Then Ino had to pretend to date an Elvis impersonator."

Sasuke's eyelids began to flutter closed, slowly and inexorably…

"Then Lee built a dojo."

Sasuke's eyes closed and, although he _tried_ to force them open, he found that he didn't have the power.

"Then I fought a haunted castle…"

Blackness took over Sasuke's mind, creeping inward: _So sleepy…_

"Then Gai fought a bunch of evil training dummies…"

And that was the final straw. Sasuke passed out, due to unbearable boredom.

"So then there was this carpenter who rigged Konoha with explosives…" Naruto continued slowly, watching Sasuke with suspicious eyes to make sure that Sasuke wasn't faking it. "But it turned out it was just fireworks."

An epic snore escaped Sasuke's lips, and he listed over to the right until his head met with Naruto's shoulder. Muttering to himself in his sleep, Sasuke snuggled in for the duration.

Naruto chuckled to himself. "What a lightweight. I still had a _looooong_ way to go."

Sasuke drooled a little bit on Naruto's shoulder in response.

Naruto took that as agreement.

--

Three hours later, Sasuke woke up to find himself wrapped up in Naruto's arms. Naruto was _still_ chattering on, regaling him with the tale of how some guy from the Takumi Village had welded a bunch of weapons to his body so it looked like the giant sword sticking out in front of him was a penis, and then used it to try to kill Gaara.

It was never going to end, Sasuke realized with horror. Naruto hadn't even raised a single finger, and already Sasuke's will to live was fading fast.

Desperate to redeem himself, Sasuke reached for his sword, but Naruto neatly caught his hand and guided it back to his chest. Naruto gave his shoulders a squeeze.

"And then," Naruto concluded with a flourish, "that perverted hermit finally came back, and this time we really _did_ start training."

Sasuke breathed a sigh of relief…

"So, here's what happened during the _first_ year of training," Naruto continued with a triumphant smirk.

And Sasuke surrendered. After all, there was no shame in even the most powerful of ninjas being defeated by the horrifying power of Naruto's filler no jutsu.

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Definitely one of the most pointless things I've written. As always, comments and reviews are most appreciated, and thanks for reading!


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